At this point it’s becoming increasingly obvious that something needs to change with this underwhelming Boston Bruins group.
The B’s suffered their most embarrassing setback of the season, an 8-2 loss to the Carolina Hurricanes at the Lenovo Center on Thursday night, where they once again parlayed defensive zone gaffes, undisciplined penalties and a general lack of competitiveness in all zones into a pathetic final result. At no point did it feel like the Bruins were truly in this game and there was zero resistance from a resigned Black and Gold group once things really started spiraling out of control against them.
That it happened on the same day that Jim Montgomery attempted a desperation move shaking all his forward lines up and sprinkling his fourth line guys throughout the group, it reveals a head coach running out of ideas when it comes to ways to pull his players out of their season-opening funk. The undeniable reality is that the Bruins look nothing like the team that they’ve been the first two years under Montgomery, and that it feels like a change is needed sooner rather than later.
Just take a look at the first goal allowed on a delayed penalty where four Bruins skaters were below the goal line and left Jack Roslovic wide open in the slot. Or the third goal allowed where Max Jones and Justin Brazeau were both gliding back up the ice to get into the play defensively rather than back-checking hard on a play where Dmitry Orlov eventually scored as an aggressive trailer on the play.
Those are the kinds of mental and effort errors that show a hockey team that isn’t fully invested right now in the results, or in each other and the kind of team hockey that’s necessary for results. That makes all the words ring hollow afterward about the need to improve and things being unacceptable, because it sure feels like that slapdash standard is currently being accepted by the players.
“We definitely need to move our feet first,” admitted David Pastrnak, who once again looked out-of-sorts with and without the puck. “There’s a lot of stick penalties, high stick…so that’s one [thing]. But in the game we just didn’t do enough five-on-five. They were all over us and we need to do better.
“Monty is just trying to get us going [with the line changes]. Obviously, it wasn’t working, so the mixing of the lines has to happen. Personally, I have no problem with it. I can read off anybody. Right now, it’s not about the combinations. We are not good enough as a team and that’s where it starts.”
Sure, it could be a roster change if the Bruins wanted to sign Tyler Johnson to a one-year contract and insert him into the forward mix, and it certainly could be a trade with somebody that’s really struggling with the Bruins right now as Morgan Geekie is after his best NHL season last year. It also definitely could be Jones shipped off this team as well after finishing minus-3 with zero shots on net 14 minutes where he made very little positive impact on the game.
But this isn’t about one or two players struggling right now for the Black and Gold in a contained problem area.
It’s pretty much the entire team of infected players flying way under reasonable expectations and wholly underachieving, which has the B’s sitting dead last in the Atlantic Division with a 4-6-1 record and a minus-13 goal differential that’s third worst in the Eastern Conference ahead of only the Montreal Canadiens and the Pittsburgh Penguins.
Montgomery took a different tact postgame comparing this sputtering season to the past couple of years when the Bruins roared out of the starting gate, but some of this feels like a “whistling past the graveyard” approach by an embattled B’s bench boss where the B’s are going to magically flick a switch.
“We had a lot of success the last two years, and we were first place at Thanksgiving the last two years, and we never achieved anything we wanted to. Right now, we’re not happy. Nobody is happy with what’s going on,” said Montgomery. “But we will get better. We will get out of it and hopefully it creates a better result come playoff time. It starts by sticking together and by working. There really is no substitute for second and third effort.”
Jim Montgomery, Trent Frederic, and David Pastrnak spoke with the media following the #NHLBruins loss to the Canes. pic.twitter.com/1m5ursnlYX
— Boston Bruins (@NHLBruins) November 1, 2024
The bottom line: The entire roster of Bruins players can’t be fired, traded or replaced — despite being really disappointed with their performance to this point.
So that leaves a head coach of a struggling team in Jim Montgomery in the last year of his contract with an organization that hasn’t given him anything approaching any kind of vote of confidence. The Bruins have looked lethargic, hesitant and just slow to react to just about everything happening on the ice, but the truth is they are nowhere close to as bad as the way they’ve played in the opening month of the season.
The Bruins players need some kind of spark to jolt them out of their current slump, and truthfully it looks like something of consequence is going to be needed to shake things up. Waiving a struggling Riley Tufte and sending him down to Providence isn’t really going to do the trick.
It feels like it needs to be a coaching change on the bench where so much of what’s happening is avoidable, correctable mistakes, and it’s felt like this is the way things have been trending since Montgomery blew up on Bruins captain Brad Marchand on the bench a couple of weeks ago.
With the calendar now moving to November, it also needs to happen quickly if the Bruins hope to climb back into playoff position in the Atlantic Division ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday in three weeks. It’s still early but the Bruins are already six points out of the top spot in the Atlantic Division and would currently have to hop over six other teams in order to jump into a wild-card playoff spot in the East.
That’s still eminently doable right now, but it could become a much more difficult task if the Bruins wait to pull the trigger on a coaching change that’s beginning to feel inevitable at some point this season. They certainly aren’t going to do it on the road right now readying for Saturday’s game in Philly, but it sure feels like Jim Montgomery’s days are numbered as B’s head coach after a horrendously poor start to this season amidst high, high expectations.
